The Wooden Sea (20 page)

I tried to sound cool and offhand. "Well, you said we looked alike.

Pretend for a minute I am him and am saying it for real. You _are _a prince, Tom. Have a good life."

"And you too, Bill."

I couldn't resist. "Vote for me when I run for president."

He laughed and went back to his lover.

How does weird get weirder? I'll tell you. Feeling pleased and lifted by what had just taken place, I left the diner smiling and cheerfully blissed out.

That lasted maybe five minutes. Out the door and turn left toward the heart of downtown Crane's View--all one block of it.

Curious to know what would be there, I tried to remember what Main Street had looked like then. My town, thirty years ago. How much had they charged at the Embassy Movie Theater for a ticket? How much had a box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts cost at their candy counter?

What were the names of the different candy they sold? Charleston Chew, Zagnut, Raisinets, Good & Plenty, Fifth Avenue... Retarded Johnny Petangles knew every one of their television ads and would recite them ad nauseum. The theater had been torn down two years ago and was replaced by a Blockbuster video store, which I thought was ironic.

Trading the big screen for the little one. Let's keep walking down McCabe's memory lane. Back then the Embassy Theater stood next to Dan Pope's Bar and Grill. It was where we all had our first legal drinks the day we turned eighteen. In my mind I could still smell the place--boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke. Next to Pope's was--

A man wearing one of those helmets that had kebab'd my brain. The learning helmets from my last days in Vienna. That's right--walking down Main Street in 1960-something Crane's View, New York, was a guy wearing a black full-head helmet. Slapping a hand over my mouth, I made some kind of strangled uh-oh sound. It felt like someone had spilled cold raw egg down my spine. What's more, there were people around but none of them paid any attention to him.

Brian Lipson in his Crane's View varsity letter jacket stood talking to Monica Richardson in front of the town library. Helmet Head walked right past them.

They both looked, no expressions changed, they went back to their conversation. My town is conservative and changeless. Always has been that way. Anything new is instantly noticed and discussed endlessly.

Whether it was Crane's View today or thirty years ago, if someone walked down the street wearing one of those goddamned goofy helmets people would notice.

Watching these two kids glance but turn away indifferently meant they were used to the sight.

That gave me the big bad creeps. Everything was possible now--chaos reigned. Back when Lipson and I sat in geometry class and I cheated off his exam papers, I never saw any helmet heads go by. If I had, I sure as hell would have told the world about it.

I decided to follow this guy. See what happened when other townspeople caught sight of him.

See if--

"Hey, Frannie!" said teenage Brian Lipson looking right at forty-seven-year-old me.

"Hello there, Frannie McCabe" echoed scrumptious Monica Richardson but with a smile dirty enough to melt any fellow's underpants.

If I had been a cartoon character at that moment you would have heard all around me the sound of car brakes screeching and seen smoke billow up from the bottoms of my shoes.

I stopped so abruptly that I really needed a moment to regain my balance.

"You know me?"

They looked at each other. Lipson snickered. "Why wouldn't we, Frannie? I mean we sit next to each other in geometry class."

"Yeah but--"

Down the block I watched Helmet Head disappear around a corner. But I had to let him go because this was ground zero for the moment.

"You know me like this?"

Monica gave her head a cute little twist to the side like a dog hearing a harmonica for the first time. "Like what?"

"Like I am now, like this!" I pointed to my chest, my face, to McCabe almost fifty years old.

"Well sure, why wouldn't we?"

"I gotta go."

"Don't forget tomorrow night, Frannie; Dionne Warwick." Monica crooned, like a siren luring me to her rock. And then the memory _hit _me like a rock.

Junior year in high school I had been trying every way I knew to get Monica Richardson to do the dirty deed with me. But she was cleverer than I was.

Whenever I thought I had her, she slipped out of my paws. Finally I decided to give it the full-court press and spend serious money on her, which I proceeded to steal from my mother's purse over the course of three weeks. The plan was a

Dionne Warwick concert in White Plains and a Surf'n' Turf dinner at Dick's Cabin restaurant. Everything went great until I took her home. I had never been to Monica's house. When she invited me in that night I thought for sure I had won. As we were going through the front door she said offhandedly, "My parents might be awake, but that's okay.

They're cool. We'll just say hi and go up to my room.

They were sitting in the den. Mr. Richardson had a pipe in his mouth and held a newspaper in his free hand. Mrs. Richardson was knitting a yellow sweater.

Both of them were stark naked. I was so stunned by the scene that I basically ran out the door back into the comforting night. After that, whenever I saw Monica at school I didn't know what to do. And I was so embarrassed by what I had seen that I never told a soul. That's why it was only years later I learned her parents were nudists.

Looking at her now and remembering that moment at her house, I didn't hear the car come up behind me and stop. Both of the kids looked over my shoulder and their mouths tightened.

"McCabe!"

The car was black with a single red light on top. That's all-- no deck of high-speed blues that strobed and flitted nervously back and forth across your eyeballs as it approached. No metal grate between the front and back seats to keep the human animals at bay when you were bringing them in. No shotgun rack bolted to the dashboard because in the 1960s guns were either on the cop's hip or stashed safely in the trunk of the car. The trunk of a Chevrolet Biscayne because the Crane's View police department only used Chevrolets. The chief of police was brother-in-law to the only Chevy dealer in town.

"Pee-Pee!" I was so happy to see him that for a moment I forgot who I was/where I was/when I was, etcetera. I simply walked across the sidewalk and made to shake hands with patrolman Peter Bucci. This guy and I went back a long, long way. When I was young, Crane's View had three full-time cops and two part-time. Pee-Pee joined the force right after high school and for the first few years he was a bullying, lazy bum. But somehow he managed to meet

and marry Camille, a great woman who turned him completely around and gave him a happy life. When I returned to town after Vietnam and became a cop, we got to be good friends. It was a hard blow to both the town and our police force when he died so unexpectedly three years ago of a stroke.

But like my father a few minutes before, here was Pee-Pee again, looking young and strong and, best of all, alive.

He grabbed my face in an iron hand and squeezed my cheeks so hard I had to open my mouth.

"Always the wiseguy aren't you, McCabe? You criminal piece of shit! Always got the mouth going. Well guess what, smartass? You're going to jail. Say bye-bye to your playmates and get in the goddamned car."

"Pee-Pee--"

He still held my mouth and squeezed harder. In a minute my teeth were going to see stars.

"Don't call me that. Only my friends call me by my name and you're not even an acquaintance.

You're shit on the bottom of my shoe, McCabe.

You're green snot I hawk up on the street. Get in the car."

What must that have looked like: a squat twenty-five-year-old butterball in a badly fitting uniform squeezing the face of a tall middle-age man who could have knocked Patrolman Bucci into next week if he had chosen to.

But I didn't. Like the good law-abiding kid I'd never been, I just got into the patrol car and stared straight ahead. He came around to the driver's side and got in with a grunt and a slide around on the seat in search off a comfy spot for his fat ass.

"I'll call your dad for you, Frannie!" Brian yelled too loudly. I was only five feet away from him. I nodded.

"But what about Dionne Warwick, Frannie? What do I do if you're still in jail?"

"Tell your father to get dressed and take you."

"What?"

We drove away before I could elucidate.

** * **

"You're fucked now, McCabe. You're going to reform school for sure this time.

It's the gray-bar hotel for you." Pee-Pee looked at me with a piranha grin.

I said nothing. The drive to the police station took five minutes. We could have walked there but I think he liked the whole routine of taking me in the proper way. When he pulled up in front of the building he turned off the engine but made no move to get out. When I reached for the door handle he barked, "I'll tell you when to move, McCabe."

I put my hand back in my lap. "What'd I do?" "What did you Jo?" He was enjoying this little time before he had to bring me in. I belonged to him for a while. He was going to milk it for all he could. This was Pee-Pee Bucci pre-Camille; Pee-Pee at his worst.

I turned slowly and looked at my friend. Who would have liked nothing more at that moment than to punch me in the mouth. "Yes. Why are you bringing me in?"

To my surprise, his voice went furious. "Am I stupid? Do I look stupid to you, McCabe?"

Young me or Gee-Gee would have said something rude and gotten smacked.

Not me--I bit my lower lip and shook my head. "No, sir."

"Sir is right, you little fuck-joint. I'll tell you what you did wrong. I'll tell you in one word--_Dalemwood. _Does that name sound familiar to your diseased brain? Painting the Dalemwood house?"

My junior year in high school a new family named Dalemwood moved to Crane's View. They had two children, both odd. George was a sophomore and his sister was a senior.

Odd kids stick out whether they want to or not. But what really got my attention was hearing these people were Jehovah's Witnesses. That was all I needed. I knew absolutely nothing about the religion other than having heard somewhere that they didn't believe in doctors. They let their children die when they got sick rather than getting them medical treatment. Suddenly I had something new to hate. Decisive action was needed. I took a can of silver spray paint from our garage and wrote JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES FUCKER CHILD KILLERS

in three-foot-high letters on the side of the Dalemwoods'

freshly painted white house. George saw me, told his parents and I was brought in by the police.

My father came to get me but was so fed up with me by then that he worked a deal with the chief of police. They left me in the jail cell overnight to think about my wicked behavior.

It had no effect. When I got out the next day I went on my fateful date with
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Monica Richardson. The only thing that shook me up was seeing her parents naked.

But if that was what was about to happen to me now-- seriously bad news. If I was locked in a jail cell for the next twenty-four hours it would be another of my seven days gone.

"Come on, house painter. Time for you to go to the basement."

That's where the cells were in the police station and it was a very bleak part of the building, believe me. Later when I became chief the first thing I did was hire an architect and a builder to make that space a lot more humane.

But thirty years ago it was a big dark basement with three holding cells and three sixty-watt bulbs to light them.

Why was I reliving my seventeen-year-old life as a forty-seven-year-old? Or at least a day in that life? The last time I returned from my future to my now, everything had been correct. Why was it now so wrong? Now life inside my house was all right (excepting Gee-Gee) but one step onto the porch and it was thirty years ago. Why had I been returned to the day that Bucci put me in jail? I could have thought a lot about these matters sitting in a cell for twenty-four hours. But there was no time to fuck around. I had five days left--maybe only four. There was only one thing to do and I hated it.

Closing my eyes, I said, "Holes in the rain." The phrase that sent me back to my future.

Or so I thought.

When I opened them again, fully expecting to be back in post-millennium Vienna, I was still in the patrol car sitting next to Pee-Pee. The only difference being he wasn't moving and neither was anything else. It was like the time on the street with Astopel in Vienna when he told me I couldn't talk to George. Who, it later turned out, had transformed from a friend into a

centuries-old dog sitting on a hotel bed.

"How do you row a boat on a wooden sea, Mr. McCabe?"

Despite all my confused looking around, I hadn't checked the backseat of the patrol car. Sitting there was the recently dead student Antonya Corando. Today she looked pretty good.

"What's happening here, Antonya?"

"You must answer my question first. It's important."

Resting an elbow on the seat I watched her in the rearview mirror. "I don't know how you'd row that boat. I haven't seen many wooden seas, to tell you the truth."

"Neither have I. It sounds like a Zen koan. I liked those when I was alive.

They tickled your brain so much you wanted to scratch it. Like Ì am turning out the light.

Where did it go?' "

I reached into Pee-Pee's shirt pocket, took out his cigarettes, and fired one up with the car lighter. "How do you row a boat on a wooden sea? Well, if the water was made of wood then you wouldn't need a boat. You could get out and walk to wherever you were going."

She smiled and had a beautiful mouth of big white teeth. "I don't know if that's the answer, but it sounds like a good one to me."

"Why are you here, Antonya?"

"Astopel wanted to come but they wouldn't let him because he messed up too many things. He was the one who killed me. And made me start doing those notebooks with the drawings of you.